Computers Are Playing an Important Role in the America’s Cup

FREMANTLE, Australia —  Every evening when America’s Cup challenger USA comes back to its berth, a $10,000 Hewlett-Packard Vectra computer is just starting its workday.

Data gathered by electronic sensors on the radical, two-ruddered San Francisco boat are offloaded into the computer and Andy Dovell, USA’s performance analyst, goes to work in the dark, crunching numbers to find out what makes USA go.

“Right now I’m doing a two-day study on tacking,” said Dovell, turning from his screen. He ran the numbers on boat speed, wind velocity and distance made good toward the destination--numbers that were recorded every time skipper Tom Blackaller tacked the boat through the wind during the day. The computer discerns the most effective techniques in various wind strengths or sea conditions.

“We can actually quantify the cost, for example, of tacking on a wave,” said Dovell. That means if Blackaller is in a situation where he needs to change course for tactical reasons, but he’s in rough water, he’ll know exactly how much it will hurt him to take that tack rather than waiting for smooth water. “We can say, ‘It’ll cost you three boat lengths.’ When you give sailors numbers like that, they listen,” said Dovell.

The computer also determines the best angle to sail relative to the wind to build speed, or the best rudder settings before, during and after tacking, as the sensors constantly record such variables as boat speed, wind angle, angle of heel, wind velocity and rudder angles and match them against the distance gained toward the destination as the boat zig-zags upwind.

Much of this is information a skipper used to arrive at intuitively. But with the computer, it’s a bit like building a porch using a level, rather than building it freehand. The carpenter’s level, like the computer on a sailboat, proves whether what looks and feels right really is.

As carpenters would say, “The bubble don’t lie.”

In the last five years, technology has changed the world of 12-meter sailing more than it did in the previous 75.

In 1906, the 12-meter formula was devised to create a breed of boats that would test both crew skill and the cleverness of designers.

The 12s are a so-called “development class,” meaning variations were encouraged in design to improve the breed, but only within narrow boundaries dictated by a formula. If a designer wanted to make a long, heavy boat he could, but he paid a penalty in the amount of sail area he could carry. As a formula balancing width, length, girth, displacement and sail area, the rule offered infinite variety, but every change had its price.

For decades yacht designers toyed with the rule, intuitively taking tucks here and adding volume there to elicit speed. The boats advanced in a slow and civilized way until 1983, when Australia II’s winged keel popped up on a computer screen and blew the lid off the game.

Her radical appendage was the product of extensive research and tank-testing at the Netherlands Ship Model Basin in Wanginengen, Holland. Her success in being the first non-American boat to win the America’s Cup rocked the world of 12-meter design and ever since, an explosion of technologies--most of them computer-dominated--have changed everything from the way sails are cut to the way tacticians tell if they’re gaining or losing against each other. Masts have television cameras, navigators work on electronic plotting graphs; keyboards and VDTs have become as intricately a part of a 12-meter as bilge pumps and 600-grit sandpaper. The sport is changing at a feverish pace.

While 17 boats were being readied for America’s Cup trials, the one that changed everything was on display in a parking lot at Victoria Quay, where the sheep ships tie up to load live cargo. Australia II stood propped on a rusty pedestal in the swirling dust for tourists to gawk at--50 cents a head, $2 a family.

Her miraculous keel, shrouded in secrecy throughout the stormy 1983 Cup series, had a hole drilled through for a support post, but even that didn’t detract from the simple beauty of the twin, delta-shaped wings.

“What’s amazing about Australia II,” mused John Marshall, design coordinator for Dennis Conner’s Stars & Stripes, one of the American fleet here trying to win the Cup back, “is that it was the first implementation of a totally new concept and they got it just about perfect the first time.”

The famous keel enabled the Australians to sail faster, closer to the wind and maneuver quicker than any conventional 12, and in the end it won them the prize that hadn’t been lost by Americans in 132 years and ended the longest winning streak in sports.

Marshall, a Harvard-educated biochemist before backsliding into sailing, would be the first to say that no man is capable of the mountain of calculations needed to figure out so complex a problem and get it right the first time.

The changes that Australia II began have continued at such a pace--thanks largely to computers--that she wouldn’t have a chance in this regatta. A new generation of 12 meters with weird keels and hull shapes than ever is now in place. All around Fremantle boat shapes are shrouded in secrecy as designers seek to keep private the information that towing-tank tests and millions of dollars worth of associated research has revealed.

Computers are everywhere--designing new boats and outmoding the old, monitoring performance, dictating tactics, navigating, shaping and even cutting sails.

Some sailors accept the change more willingly than others, but where in 1983 computers were an afterthought in all but the Australia II camp, where they were used for design purposes, there is not a boat here that isn’t playing the numbers game.

Every few seconds on the high-flying Australian entry Kookaburra III--now a favorite to win the right to defend the Cup--an American-made Digital MicroVax II computer, humming along in the bilge on 400 pounds of batteries, sends out a signal to electronic sensors scattered around the boat.

Rudder settings, wind strength and direction, boat speed, compass heading, angle of heel, tension on the rigging, sail settings, location of the boat on the course and other details are gathered into a data base.

In the stern, navigator Derek Clark sits at a four-screen video-display terminal, monitoring and calling up analysis as needed and wiping the salt spray from his screen.

Does the computer, with three years of stored weather data, detect a trend of shifting winds? Has the prevailing sea breeze known as the Fremantle Doctor arrived, or is it likely not to come in at all? Does the jib in service give the best performance in these winds, based on past performance, or would another sail do better? What will wind strength and direction be after rounding the next mark?

Is skipper Iain Murray sailing the best course toward the buoy or should he sail three degrees closer to the wind, heading more directly to the target even if it costs 110th of a knot in speed? Only the computer knows for sure; it has the historical data.

A camera inside Kookaburra’s mast trains an eye on trim and condition of the sails and Clark can call up its reports. Navigating is done by Syledis, a French system interfaced with the computer, which uses signals from electronic buoys to establish precise location on the course and display it on a plotting field.

And Kookaburra does not even have the last word in gadgetry. One competitor has a ray gun on board which, pointed at an opponent, will register the enemy’s distance and bearing and automatically display it graphically on an onboard screen.

Zap! You’re ahead. Zap! You’re behind.

Yet, Kookaburra navigator’s terminal with its multiple displays is a first step in the budding development of onboard telemetry that makes the crew part of a computerized network. Jim Gretzky, design coordinator for Heart of America, envisions a day when every crew position will have its own VDT, giving updates and advice for each crewman.

Already, one boat here reportedly tried a VDT at the bow, giving the crewman posted there second-by-second readouts of time and distance to the starting line during prestart maneuvers. But that, according to insiders, proved more confusing than helpful.

“The biggest problem,” said Gretzky, “is making the system idiot-proof, so it isn’t giving you more information than you need. We have the capacity to collect so much, but you don’t want to tell them too much while they’re racing. It’s doubt-inducing, like having a smart-ass in the back of the boat, second-guessing you. But when they come back at night you can say, ‘Here’s how to set up the rig. Look at the numbers. The hell with how the boat feels. This is what works.’ ”

Most boats here don’t have the onboard analysis capacity of Kookaburra III. Most collect data but do their analyzing at night, on big machines in dark offices within the racing compounds, like the San Francisco boat, USA.

USA is by far the most innovative hull design here, with no keel at all, just rudders fore and aft to keep the boat from skidding sideways, plus a 40,000-pound torpedo of lead suspended amidships for stability.

Said Bill Langan, who designed the now-conventional winged-keel entry America II, “There’s no way anyone would have given Blackaller the money to build that boat if he didn’t have the computer data to prove it could work.”

In fact, said Phil Kaiko, one of the computer whizzes on the USA design team, it took one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, the freon-cooled Crays used by the aerospace industry, to sort through the mysteries of double rudders.

“It was telling us shapes, different lift-to-drag ratios. It wouldn’t tell us, ‘Two rudders are best.’ It just says, ‘If you’re going to do two rudders, these are the ones.’ ”

Kaiko said once the decision was made to design a hull with rudders at both ends, the computer weeded out hull shapes that would never work, using a velocity prediction program.

Because of the nationalistic overtones of the competition, much computer time is donated. But even if it weren’t, the multimillion dollar campaigns could buy extensive research, where a “starving artist” designer, as Marshall put it, could never invest so much in one potentially disastrous design.

Every designer used computers in weeding through high-tech keel designs to determine hydrodynamic flow and the problems of drag versus the benefits of lift--a tradeoff between how much friction a winged keel produces in the water against how much it helps a boat from skidding left or right when the wind pushes against the sails.

But they all agreed that old-fashioned on-the-water testing still provides the final proof. The interraction of a hull shape with constantly changing winds and wave patterns is simply too intricate for any computer program yet designed to thoroughly encompass. With computers, said Langan, “any time you have more variables than you can count on both hands, you have a big problem.”

In the last five years computers have also invaded sailmaking lofts. “Before that,” said Mike Schreiber, chief sailmaker for Stars & Stripes, “it was down on your knees, bending the battens.”

What computers can do is exactly visualize a sail in three dimensions, with the depth of the pocket formed where the sail curves outwards included as a numbered part of the calculations. It used to be a two-dimensional science, said Schreiber, a flaxen-haired beach boy from Southern California. The sail designer calculated the height and length of panels to be sewn, but guessed at the flying shape they’d create.

“The computer doesn’t see a sail as a bunch of two-dimensional panels sewn together,” he said. “It sees it as it flies and gives you the numbers.”

Oddly, computerized sail-design is no faster than the old way, said Angus Melrose, who makes sails for the British boat, White Crusader. “It’s slower, actually, but better.”

But the extra design time is offset by new equipment that cuts the cloth on orders from the computer.

“I just dial in the numbers,” said Melrose, “send the floppy disk downstairs to the cutting machine and it does the rest.”

The machine follows Melrose’s orders better than any human he ever hired, he said, and can cut the panels for a 12-meter mainsail in four hours, instead of the two days it took by hand.

With sails, hull design, performance, navigation and tactics all coming under the scrutiny of electronic gadgetry, the question is whether 12-meter sailing is losing its humanity. The skippers say no, that once on the course it’s still man-to-man, and no machine can replace primal competitive instincts.

The computer buffs aren’t so sure. “When you add it all up,” said Gretzky, ticking off the computer’s many functions, “it’s just about the whole shootin’ match.”

In any case, said Kookaburra skipper Murray, who helped design and build the boat he drives, the computer “is just there. It’s a part of it now.”